‘Oh, fuck, it’s you,’ said Kath the next day when she found Annie standing on her doorstep.
She turned without a word and led the way up the hall. Annie closed the front door behind her and followed her cousin’s great wallowing arse into the kitchen. Once there, Kath, who was wearing a deeply unflattering navy shell suit and greyish-white T-shirt, collapsed on a chair by the table as if the effort of opening her own front door had exhausted her. She picked up a smouldering fag from an ashtray.
Annie looked around the kitchen. Nothing ever changed here. The place was the same tip it had always been, dirty washing piled on the floor instead of in the laundry basket, unwashed cups and plates littering the draining board and filling the grubby sink. The table awash with debris from meals, toast-crumbs, a paper blazoned with the headline PIPER ALPHA TRAGEDY, dog-eared magazines and chunks of half-eaten pizza.
‘Hi,’ said the eighteen-year-old girl leaning against the sink. She was fair-haired, hazel-eyed and showing a big toothy overbite, dressed in skinny hipster jeans and a pink T-shirt.
‘Hiya, Molly,’ said Annie.
Her eyes drifted to the young man standing beside his sister. Jimmy Junior was twenty-one, and while his sister was plain and a bit goofy-looking like her mother, Junior favoured his father. He had close-cropped dirty-blond hair and a face any sane woman would fall for. His eyes were a stunning clear blue, vivid as Sri Lankan sapphires.
Annie’d always liked Junior, she’d put him forward for the bar job at the Shalimar. I have a weakness for good looks, she thought, and knew it to be true. But it was more than that with Junior. He was her blood. Added to that, he was a hard worker, and he had charm.
‘Hi, Junior,’ Annie greeted him.
He nodded.
‘What is it this time?’ asked Kath.
Annie turned to her cousin. Once briefly pretty in her youth, Kath had settled into her mid-forties as if she belonged there, with a disastrous poodle perm on her yellow-grey hair. Her face was red and her breath was wheezy. Annie knew Kath hated her and she also suspected that Kath bore a grudge against her over the disappearance of Jimmy Senior.
‘There’s been some stuff going down, I just wanted to tell you,’ said Annie.
‘What stuff?’ asked Jimmy Junior.
Annie looked at him. She wondered what Kath had told the kids about their father. Had she told them he’d once been Max Carter’s number one man, trusted and revered? Or had she told them the real, painful truth?